The Importance of Learning Without Understanding

ThisWeekWith.....Jean Guitton:
"Form and content must arise out of chaos and indolence via the same effort. Often it happens that content proceeds from form, or so the poets seem to be saying when they speak of their work. And since you have less power over ideas than over words (because ideas are few, abstract, and desembodied), you often make the idea sound forth by pressing on the keyboard of language.
This suggests that when a child is still so small that he does not yet have enough ideas, the greatest help you can give him is to people his memory with beautiful forms; for the moment the forms will be void but later they will summon up for him both meaning and criteria of usage. The prerequisite for being original is to know your own language well; that is, to have mastered its established structures. This is why all classical, formal instruction may often require the student to learn without understanding, why it is addressed not to comprehension but to the cadences of memory. Certainly, you must also awaken sensation, develop and guide initiative, help the student to get the feel of things, but he would have to be a young genius to sense that his most profitable exercise is the "learning by heart" he so dreads. Yet if the son of man does not have one or two languages at his command, he will not rejoice in his world. He will be like a blind man, for he will possess things but he will not possess the Word, which is the light of all things."
A Student's Guide to Intellectual Work, p.124